William Shakespeare: Seine Zeit - Sein Leben - Sein Werk [William Shakespeare: His Time - His Life - His Work] b. Rezensionen und Stellungnahmen / Book reviews and comments

Book review by the German Anglicist and Shakespeare scholar Professor emeritus Dr Kurt Otten, University of Heidelberg, Visiting Fellow, Clare Hall, Cambridge University, in: Anglistik. Zeitschrift des Deutschen Anglistenverbandes (September 2004) - Excerpt:

Until now it could be assumed that principal new discoveries about Shakespeare’s life could not be expected. But the present biography by the Mainz Shakespeare scholar Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel interlinks the older material with new important findings from the perspective of Catholic resistance in [Elizabethan and Jacobean] England so convincingly that it leads to a thorough new interpretation of Shakespeare’s life viewed from the standpoint of the struggles of conscience in the age of Reformation. The author opens up unexpected but plausible views on the complete work, which, hitherto neglected, disclose astonishing connections and political circumstances of the time. In doing so, she made use of the latest technological possibilities and methods of historical and cultural historical research, cooperating with important public personalities, selected institutes, scientists and specialists of related disciplines. The names range from Queen Elizabeth II, outstanding private collections of aristocratic country seats, archivists, Renaissance scholars, art and costume historians, criminologists, archeologists, heraldic experts, curators, physicists, experts of photogrammetry, architects, cartographers, gynaecologists and other medical experts, biologists, botanists and lawyers down to literary scholars and philologists.

To some readers the author’s attempt to interlink anew Shakespeare’s work with his time and a new and comprehensive biography may seem too motley and polypragmatic but from the wealth of detailed, newly interpreted and interlinked observations a carefully reconstructed picture is created and a fascinating interpretation of Shakespeare’s life and literary work against the background of the (for Elizabethan Catholics) rigid reality of religious policy.

At first the author deals with the reasons for the gaps and misunderstandings of former biographers. Shakespeare’s life in London is relatively well documented, but many findings and details were removed by zealots during the republic of Oliver Cromwell and even before, partly because of political and religious prejudices. Others got lost through negligence. Why is it that this should have happened to Shakespeare of all people? Could the poet’s resistance towards the crown’s religious policies have played a major part in this?

In the province and the neighbourhood of ancient and influential Catholic country seats the poet’s personality was already coined in his youth, as the author illustrates. Hitherto this had only been presumed. The fate of his parents as persecuted adherents of the forbidden ‘old faith’ was seminal for the poet’s religious and philosophical views. Up to now it had practically not been made accessible.

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By marrying Mary Arden, John Shakespeare had married the daughter of a respected Catholic country gentleman and officiated as chamberlain, alderman, bailiff (mayor) and justice of the peace. Then the abrupt break of his career, for which, according to the author’s investigations, his secret affiliation to the Catholic religion accounts for.

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John Shakespeare had employed and paid secret Catholics as teachers of the Stratford Grammar School several times - obviously in agreement with the Stratford town council. Later these teachers became prominent Catholics and Jesuits in exile and founded abroad seminaries for the sons of the Catholic English gentry and bourgeoisie. William Shakespeare and his schoolmates were taught by such teachers, who contributed decisively to the astonishingly successful re-Catholicising of England.

The father’s mortgaging of a house and lands, the amount of his pecuniary penalties and an entry in the Douai diary, deleted only in the 19th century, point to the fact that John Shakespeare had sent his son to the Collegium Anglicum which had adopted the Jesuit concept of education. For it was depressing for English Catholics that their sons were excluded from the (English) universities because of the compulsory oath of supremacy, which was incompatible with their conscience.

If William Shakespeare left Stratford in 1585 hastily, this is now less due to the legend of his poaching rather than - and more conclusively - to his flight from the hunter of Catholics and justice of the peace Sir Thomas Lucy, who is later skilfully ridiculed by the playwright. Prior to that he had been employed as a private teacher by the distinguished aristocratic family of the de Hoghtons in Lancashire under the name Shakeshafte (E.A.J. Honigmann) and, as the author could prove, had committed himself to actively participate in the resistance that aimed at re-Catholicising England. Up to the end of his life Shakespeare held firmly to these principles.

Both gatehouses of the former London cloister Blackfriars were devoted to the service of English crypto-Catholicism. There Mass was said regularly and cure of souls pursued. And it was there that persecuted Catholic priests and believers were sheltered and received aiding and abetting of an escape. In 1613, Shakespeare purchased the eastern gatehouse of Blackfriars, through which, among others, the Jesuit priest John Gerard could escape his hunters after the Gunpowder Plot (1605). Hitherto scholars had inquired in vain into the commercial benefit of this Shakespearean accession.

Lancashire and Warwickshire were Catholic isles in a Protestant landscape. With great probability, Shakespeare could have spent the seven ‘lost years’ (1585-92), about which nothing was known before the author’s researches, at the Collegium Anglicum, which at that time was based at Rheims, and making visits to Rome, the dates of which the author was able to establish because of the pseudonyms Shakespeare had used in the pilgrims’ hospice of the English College at Rome. This would account for Shakespeare’s superior theological and mundane education, his knowledge of patristics and legal practices, but also his being well grounded in French and the true to life scenarios of his plays, set in the cities of Upper Italy.

The explosive conclusions the author has already drawn in her book on Shakespeare’s hidden existence (Die verborgene Existenz des William Shakespeare) (2001) - because of her presentation of spectacular new sources or sources that she has made newly accessible - are now confirmed in an amazing way by two further documents from Shakespeare’s lifetime, independent of each other, which she has (re-)discovered. These concern the poet’s activities in the Catholic underground, his travels to Rome and others. Now we know what kind of employment he pursued during the ‘lost years’ (cf. pp. 68-71) and are informed about his lodgings on the Continent (cf. p. 165).

For the new image of Shakespeare, now present, pioneering methods of modern historiography were convincingly employed. At the beginning, there was the process of identifying the Darmstadt Shakespeare death mask. Contrary to many expectations, the mask proved to be genuine and to be the model for Shakespeare’s funerary bust at Stratford-upon-Avon, after having undergone a criminological test of authenticity executed by the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation and employing the latest technology. It was a discovery of the first order. By cooperating with medical and arthistorical experts, it allowed further insights into Shakespeare’s illnesses and secure knowledge about the hitherto disputed interdependences of Shakespeare portraits and the benefits of knowledge derived from them.

In addition, the author succeeded in proving Shakespeare’s friendship with Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and his close connection with the court circles of Elizabeth I. She disclosed the mystery of the ‘Dark Lady’ of the sonnets, the Lady Elizabeth Vernon, a lady-in-waiting to the queen, and her relationship with Shakespeare and his high-ranking friend, who won the favour of his (Shakespeare’s) mistress and replaced him. The Earl of Southampton had been the longstanding friend and patron of Shakespeare and his theatre company. This identification also proved the hitherto disputed self-testimony of the sonnets to be true. Thus the sonnets allow us to gain an insight into Shakespeare’s emotional life at the time of origin of this poetry and demonstrate the open and courageous literary representation of a ménage à trois, which scholars hitherto would never have thought the poet or his noble friend capable of doing with such uprightness and which they would not have thought possible within the framework of the then valid concept of virtue or tolerance of the Elizabethan aristocracy. The late Oxford historian A. L. Rowse had already provided us with some partial findings. He suspected that the high-ranking friend was Southampton. Highly pregnant, Elizabeth Vernon was expelled from the Court in the summer of 1598. She married the Earl of Southampton and left behind the proud picture of the pregnant ‘Persian Lady’, then a daughter, who bore Shakespeare’s facial features, and a hitherto unpublished Shakespeare sonnet - a brilliant way of giving evidence by the author.

This personal experience, which moved the poet, is - as the author demonstrates - closely connected with an event of Elizabethan contemporary history which took a tragic course for Shakespeare and the English Catholics. Southampton was thought of as a radiating figure. He was - as Essex - the pride and joy of the court, according to the concept of the gentleman in Cortegiano: ‘The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye’ (Hamlet, III, 1). He failed politically and as a human being because of court intrigues - just like the Earl of Essex. On the latter the ‘commons’ and Catholics had placed their expectation, as far as the future of England was concerned. Essex - Shakespeare was his enthusiastic adherent - became the model for Hamlet. Southampton, his closest friend, stood by his side at the time of the rebellion in the year 1601. Essex’s condemnation and his execution as a traitor as well as Southampton’s death sentence that was turned into life imprisonment now throw a new light on Shakespeare’s tragic phase. For a long time scholars have rightly discussed the general darkening in the plays - immediately after the turn of the 17th century. After the failure of the Essex rebellion, in the eyes of Shakespeare and the English Catholics, the great political hopeful (Essex) had died, who stood for reconciliation and religious tolerance. It has long been assumed that Denmark in Hamlet meant England, that Hamlet in the sense of sonnet 66 would have to be regarded as Shakespeare’s personal evidence and that Polonius is modelled on Lord Burghley (=William Cecil), but only in the author’s biography on Shakespeare these connections prove to be part of the historical reality.

In all of Shakespeare’s works the bitter experiences of the crisis year 1601 are echoed, the year of the failure of the Essex rebellion and of the execution of the political hopeful Essex. In the allegorical elegy ”The Phoenix and the Turtle”, written immediately after the condemnation of Essex and published in a small print run for his adherents, the Shakespeare scholar Hammerschmidt-Hummel has brought to light all hidden hints on the Essex circle and his political opponents convincingly. Elizabeth I is encoded as crow and hangman’s bird. When the queen died (1603), Shakespeare was silent.

Some of the material the author had published previously (cf. Die verborgene Existenz des William Shakespeare / The hidden existence of William Shakespeare, Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder, 2001). Now this has become one of the central points of reference of her Shakespeare biography and of the origin and interpretation of Shakespeare’s works against the background of the rigid scenarios of contemporary history and religious policies under Elizabeth I and James I.

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Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, in a well thought-out, clearly structured process of historical documents and as a lively experience, has reconstructed Shakespeare’s singularity in connection with the age of the great Tudors and the first Stuart king. Her evaluations will not remain undisputed, but they are a basis from which we can think ahead. She has managed to gain a magnificent success. She has given a decisive work to the humanities whose pluralism has become increasingly questionable, a work by which not only a single discipline can orientate itself but also a big reading public. To put it in a nutshell: In this biography on Shakespeare on a scholarly basis - it is the very first in the German language - the reader will find everything he always wanted to know about Shakespeare and of which he believed that no one would ever find out about. In the meantime we do speak again of an educational canon: This pictorially and lexically very well equipped work, which also has a comprehensive chronological table, is part of that canon and an absolute must.

(With kind permission of the editor of Anglistik: Professor Dr Dr h. c. Rüdiger Ahrens, University of Wuerzburg, e-mail: ruediger.ahrens@mail.uni-wuerzburg.de)

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